1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of computers and, in particular, to methods, hardware products, and computer program products for implementing electronically based negotiation sessions for providing information access in electronic social networks.
2. Description of Background
Electronic social networks (ESNs) represent a multi-billion dollar market. This is manifested by their increasing popularity and rapidly growing user base throughout the world. In spite of this, ESNs still suffer from a multitude of technological problems which, from a general perspective, result in an inadequate electronic representation of real-world social relationships. This hinders an even larger-scale adoption of ESNs and diminishes the value that individual users are able to extract from ESNs.
One problem with existing ESNs is that users cannot flexibly define the visibility of their profile information to other users in an efficient yet fully user-controlled way. In particular, users cannot reciprocally react to the amount and type of profile information their contacts are willing to share. As a result, while some users openly (but not always knowingly) share a lot of profile information with their contacts, these contacts may only share a limited amount of profile information in return.